Underneath
by That Girl55
Summary: Chihiro can only find God when she is drowning. Oneshot, ChihiroXHaku


**Songs Used: The Mephistopheles of Los Angeles by Marilyn Manson**

()()()

 _"Are we fated, faithful, or fatal?"_

()()()

Chihiro knows no Gods.

She's seen them, sure. She's seen them walk and talk like humans, she's seen them clean and dirty and they've worshiped her more than she's praised them.

In the end they are all the same. They were human once, too, and one day, she assumes, they will return that way.

With no faith left in her, Chihiro makes up her own religion. And it involves a lot of water.

()()()

Her parents divorced a year after her trip to the Spirit World, something that didn't surprise her. She moved to Tokyo, with her mother, while her father drowned everything he had with a bottle of _Huangjiu_. She did not miss him, and that frightened her mother, so for the next six months Chihiro saw a therapist twice a week.

The lady was nice enough, but she didn't know what to make of the eleven year old girl. She finally told her mother that Chihiro was "too mature for her own good," and told her to make some friends her own age.

She joined the swim team. In the water was the only place she felt like she was home.

()()()

Chihiro's mother works days and nights, long and hard. Chihiro, as a result, spends hours alone, which weigh heavily on her conscious.

She tells her mother she's going to bed early, and really she heads to the pond in the park by her house. There's a little outlet where the water is bright blue and nearly clear and there's no one around, so she strips down to nothing and she bathes herself, lets the water run over her like it did in the bathhouse. She sticks her head under and it's easy to imagine that she is back there, with Rin, scrubbing and cleaning and working.

With her head under the water, holding her breath, it's easy to feel like she has a purpose. That is what finally forces her to resurface.

()()()

The year she turns sixteen her friends (the one or two she's made) start to worry about her.

How could they not? She's the pale little thing whose mother is never home and never sees her father. She's never had a date or a boyfriend, never had sleepovers at her house or attended a single party. Rumor has it she swims naked in the town pond at night, but she neither confirms nor denies it.

Her girlfriends laugh it off.

" _Kureijī Chihiro,_ " They say. _Crazy Chihiro._

She laughs too. She pretends she doesn't hear them, that it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.

Sometimes Chihiro thinks she would've been happier if she hadn't known the Spirit World existed, if she'd gone through life oblivious, instead of this constant ache, this incessant wanting that she didn't know how to satisfy.

Part of her was missing, and it only filled when she was drowning herself.

()()()

Chihiro dreams about him.

She won't tell a soul, won't say it out loud for fear that he is listening, but he comes to her at night.

Haku is there and he is solid and he's kissing her, touching her in ways that make her moan, making her happy and sad at the same time. He is undressing her, rolling her shirt up and kissing her stomach, her chest, her neck. She's yanking his jeans off and she can see how he's grown, how he's gotten taller, how he's filled out. Chihiro lays on her back again, letting him take over.

Haku always knew what to do with her, what to do _to_ her.

She knows it's a dream, she knows she doesn't want it to end.

()()()

She puts an end to it all the day she turns seventeen.

Living in a fantasy, chasing boys who don't exist is one thing at sixteen, but at seventeen it is entirely another. She goes out on dates with a few of the boys from school even though their dark hair isn't long enough and they don't look at her like she hangs the stars in the sky each night, but they're nice enough.

Slowly, nice enough becomes good, and good becomes better. Slowly, Chihiro lets herself fall in love with one of them.

He's no Haku, but he'll do.

()()()

By nineteen Chihiro is working a dead-end job in a tiny apartment that she shares with Heng.

His name means permanent, or constant. It suits him.

He has big hands and a big body, and large dreams to go with it. He talks about owning his own company someday, about building a business up from the ground. For now, he busts tables at an American restaurant in town that sells the worst food Chihiro has ever tried and he's lucky if he can save enough money for them to pay the bills at the end of the month.

She's been here for a year, in the same apartment, with the same boy, and she wonders if this will be her end, if all her days will consist of the same person, the same thing. She shrugs, decides it's good enough.

Chihiro finds herself resigning to a life of 'good enough' and that makes her feel sick to her stomach.

When Heng comes home from the Hard Rock Cafe all of Chihiro's things are packed and no one can find her anywhere.

()()()

She's standing on a train platform even though no train has come this way in at least a hundred years, and she wonders if life is a game. She wonders if maybe she's already won, if she's reached the finish line back when she was ten years old and now she's just running around the board, looking for something, for anything.

She wonders if, by returning here, she's going in circles.

Either way, she had to come.

The place looks no different than it did nine years ago, and nothing's grown. Night has yet to fall, but she can already smell the food cooking, and if she closes her eyes she feels something she can't identify, and it takes her a minute to realize it is the feeling of coming home.

The Spirit World is where she longs to be, but is it where she belongs?

Chihiro's hands shake because she's never been so successful alive as she had when she was on the other side, and she'd never worked for anything so hard as she worked in that bathhouse. She thinks about her friends there - Bo and Rin and Haku - would any of them remember her?

She sucks in a breath and rubs her hands on her cutoffs. There is only one way to find out.

()()()

They do not welcome her with open arms. She is not the prodigal son, returning from a few years astray.

She is the girl who beat Yubaba. She is the girl, full of youth and hope, who left the bathhouse, only to return nine years later, beaten and battered and bored.

Rin is angered over her return. The girl she fought so hard to protect, to keep away from Yubaba's wrath and Haku's mood swings, to protect from the hardships of the bathhouse, is suddenly back, suddenly wants to be here.

"You won," Rin tells her. "You should've taken your freedoms and left, not signed another goddamn contract."

But Chihiro, who is suddenly Sin again, says nothing. Rin doesn't understand that freedom isn't always found in being free.

Nobody, on that note, seems to understand her return. Most are happy to see her again, glad to have her back working for them, but they don't understand why she chose this.

Kamaji is the only one who seems to understand really, the only who who accepts. When he talks to her now, his eyes have the same sadness in them that they did when he handed her the train tickets.

"Life isn't for everyone," he nods, smiling and offering her a bit of the candy he feeds the soot.

She takes it, she always does - not because she likes it, but because it is the right thing to do.

Haku isn't angry when she finds him - it is as if he expected this. He is no longer Yubaba's slave, but her apprentice. The boy she loved is older, hardened by the world just as she is. He's no longer a spirit or a god, but something in between, something that makes her feel magic in her core and happiness in her tired feet.

When he smiles at her, which is rare, it is full of joy. When he kisses her, his lips pressed hard against her neck, which is common, she feels like she is a god.

She feels like she did when she was underwater, like she is unable to breathe, unable to feel properly, and she loves it.

When he lets go, she comes up for air.

Sin almost wishes she didn't have to.

()()()

 _"_ _I'm ready to meet my maker."_


End file.
